politechbot.com: AAAS statistician testifies at Milosevic trial in The Hague

New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets

This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to meet me in Paris on a given day (but have no time to say more), and you’ve never been there before, you’ll go to the Eiffel Tower — but if we have previously met in Paris, you’ll go to wherever we met before. At least, that’s how I’ll bet.
These are examples of Schelling points, as I (mis)understand the notion.

But.
I know two people who have various things in common.
Suppose I tell each to meet the other in Chicago on a given day.
If they know nothing about each other, they’ll go to some generic Chicago landmark.
If I tell each that the other studied physics at UChi, they’ll go to the site of Fermi’s reactor, I guess.
But if I tell Bruce only that David is a science fiction fan, and tell David only that Bruce teaches physics, they’ll probably go to two different places.

I’m not sure what this thought-experiment tells us, if anything. 😉

If I were given to clichés, I might suggest that if you were to look in the dictionary under “you cannot make this shit up” you’d find a picture of www.We Made Out in a Tree and This Old Guy Sat and Watched Us.com: “The site dedicated to odd quotes, strange statements, bad writing and other oddities of the English language.”

How old is the convention of writing nicknames as middle names, e.g. (taking a handy fictional example) “Tim ‘Curly’ Beamish”? Why do you see even “Tim ‘Curly Tim’ Beamish” (gordelpus) rather than “‘Curly’ Tim Beamish”? What is the convention (if any) in other languages?

2004 Nov 12: KBLX has a disc-jockey called Victor ‘Big Daddy’ Zaragosa in announcements, but he calls himself Big Daddy Victor Zaragosa.

I just got a spam with this tag:

. . . This message is sent in compliance of the new email Bill HR 1910. Under Bill HR 1910 passed by the 106th US Congress on May 24, 1999, this message cannot be considered SPAM as long as I include a valid return address and the way to be removed. . . .

Traditionally the ‘law’ cited is Section 301 of HR 1618, if memory serves, and I hadn’t seen it given a date before.

This gives me a fab idea for a business: produce trinitite for collectors by setting off nukes on the Moon. (It wouldn’t be the same as the original trinitite, because Lunar soil has more aluminum, if memory serves.)

Bob’s Cartoons “I later discovered that, of all the disciplines at CMU, material science is the only one with no cartoons at all in their hallway.”